Reviewing Hayek’s Bastards (June 2025)

Quinn Slobodian, a Canadian, is a professor of international history at Boston University having previously taught at Wellesley College, both private institutions. Two points need emphasizing. First, for all of his scholarship, Slobodian is a historian not an economist, and his focus is on the convergence of politics and economics, which generally aligns with the real world most of us live in but which runs counter to Economics proper. Second, his research and teaching background are in private not public higher education. This latter point is relevant as he is a partisan in the clash of two economic traditions each comprised of its own elites—the laissez-faire schools of which neoliberalism is a prominent strain and the interventionists whose 20^th century lineage traces back to the Keynesians. Both traditions ultimately impact us, the general public.

The term neoliberalism can be confusing especially given all the ‘neos’ in the world today. The neoliberalism that Slobodian writes about gives prominence to the market in resolving the allocation of society’s scarce resources. According to this view, things only get fouled up when nonmarket forces, notably government (democracy), intervene to change (correct) market outcomes. Another way to put it is to contrast neoliberalism with the Keynesian tradition. The latter finds its origins in combating the massive unemployment of the Great Depression and subsequent recessions (downturns) in the boom-bust business cycle. But, for neoliberals, markets, if unimpeded, don’t fail. Markets will eventually clear, meaning that the unemployed will find jobs, if the costs of labour (wages, salaries, benefits, pension plans, etc.) fall far enough. Look no further than Javier Milei’s Argentina to see the latest real-life experiment with full-throttle neoliberalism.

This is the third book by Quinn Slobodian that I have reviewed in the past two years. The first is The Globalists: End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism and the second Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of World Without Democracy. Both reviews were published in my Writings Near the End of the Human Era in 2023. Like Slobodian’s previous two books, this one has a provocative title, Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold and the Capitalism of the Far Right.

In Globalists, Slobodian traces the genealogy of neoliberalism back to the Austrian school of economics, focusing on Ludwig von Mises and his student, Friedrich von Hayek. The reader is brought up to date in Crack-Up Capitalism with the anarcho-capitalists who believe that the state can be replaced by private economic zones, akin to those special economic zones worldwide that are exempt from onerous environmental and labour regulations but are still entitled to state funding as well as the social and physical infrastructure of the state. The reader can locate the South African billionaires, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, in this company. In Hayek’s Bastards, Slobodian introduces us to the new fusionism(1) of economic laissez-faire and the eugenics of race and intelligence. Ludwig von Mises institutes, headquartered in Auburn, Alabama, have spread around the world, marketing this latest variant of neoliberalism. Prominent figures include Lew Rockwell, Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Slobodian regards these new neoliberals as the illegitimate offspring of laissez-faire tradition, but the reader can judge for themselves.

In the Introduction, which Slobodian entitles ‘Volk Capital,’ Hayek’s bastards are characterized as follows,

This book argues that the appeal to nature was a central part of the neoliberal solution to a problem they faced in the decades after the Cold War. This was an era in which communism was dead but, as they put it, Leviathan lived on. Public spending continued to expand even as capitalism became the only surviving economic system. . . . Confounded by persistent demands for the redress of inequality at the expense of efficiency, stability, and order, neoliberals turned to nature in matters of race, intelligence, territory, and money as a way to erect a bulwark against the encroaching demands of progressives and hopefully roll back social changes to return to a hierarchy of gender, race, and cultural difference they imagined to be rooted in genetics as well as tradition.

The term ‘Volk Capital’ is used purposefully instead of human capital to make clear that the labour source in the neoliberal’s ideal world had a hereditary component, which means that science of inheritance (genetics)—what else but white supremacy (a.k.a. christian ethnonationalism or western civilization)—is invited in through the back door. Voilà, we’re back in the hot sun of the July cotton fields of 19^th century Alabama.

Except that now, the cotton fields are harvested by machines, and the mechanization of production throughout the economy makes millions redundant. The new fusionists concept of labour had to change. It had to "focus on the extra-economic cultural prerequisites for a functioning market society . . . [an] ethno-economy,” which “involved the recasting of humanity into ‘cognitive classes,’ or what I call neurocastes, as intelligence was asserted as the new sorting mechanism for a postindustrial society.” This may sound familiar—Elon and his youthful prodigies in the Department of Government Efficiency?

So why is Slobodian worth reading? Well, he is one of the leading scholars who has studied the intellectual history of neoliberalism which is, according to him, stripping Economics naked of its democratic capitalist garb and its pretense of scientific objectivity. Much has been written recently about capitalism’s having grown detached from democracy, and there is no shortage of criticisms of the arcane science of economics, its alleged value-neutrality and its longstanding subservience to political interests other than the demos. Several of those texts are referenced in my reviews of Globalists and Crack-Up Capitalism published my Writings Near the End of the Human Era (2023).

Shocking as it may seem, there are no empty seats on the opposite side of the aisle from Slobodian. From Alabama, the Ludwig von Mises Institute world headquarters has found a welcoming home in the Loveliest Village on the Plains. Among other criticisms, Slobodian may be dismissed as a pop economist, as did one of my former Economics professors at Auburn University when speaking of John Kenneth Galbraith (alas, a liberal and a Canadian). Galbraith’s notions of countervailing power and the frenzied greed that precipitated the 1929 stock market crash did little to endear him to economists of a conservative political persuasion. Incidentally, both notions are as relevant now as they were in his writings more than 70 years ago. And for an excellent literary exposition of the 1929 crash and its participants, see Hernán Díaz’s Trust reviewed in my Artifacts of a Troubled and Troublesome Species (2025).

But what should be the most compelling reason for reading Slobodian now is that the new neoclassical fusionists are in the American government. So, who are they—these vocal opponents of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Emancipation Proclamation—and where do they want to take America? Just think back to the fundamental tenets of neoliberalism’s new fusionism—an unfettered market, the end of democratic control of capitalism, the superiority of intelligence markers, cultural Christianity and closed borders. Essentially, government stripped of the role in balancing the needs and interests of the market against those of society at large. In other words, government in the service of private wealth, rather than government as the countervailing power of the demos, the people. This may seem to be much ado about nothing, but during the early days of the second Trump administration, one sees that there is so much further plutocratic oligarchy(2) can be extended to control American society by eviscerating democracy and any pretensions to political egalitarianism.

Endnotes